Taste Of The Town

Southeast Asian Sparkle

Sidestepping Celebrity, Burma SuperStar Shines on Park Street

    Rare is the restaurant in today’s epicurean climate that doesn’t play the game and mobilize a phalanx of restaurant publicists, menu consultants and interior design gurus before a calculated grand opening; pimp its fare on loitering food writers awaiting their next amuse bouche; and basically do anything and everything to get foot traffic off the sidewalk and through the front door.
    Woe to the restaurant—and especially the chef—that doesn’t play the game. Besides restaurant survival, at stake is fame for the chef, which translates into media coverage today and perhaps immortality tomorrow—an Iron Chef tête-à-tête with Bobby Flay to rerun in perpetuity on the Food Network, a niche cookbook focusing on one random foodstuff prepared 50 ways, and maybe, just maybe, a signature line of brightly colored silicone cookware.
    None of that is in the future for Alameda’s Burma SuperStar, one of the newer restaurants to posh up the revitalized downtown Park Street area. Since arriving in town at the end of 2007 under the short-lived name Bagan, Burma SuperStar has staunchly refused to play the game. Not only did the restaurant arrive quietly and under cover of night, posting the most modest of wood-and-iron nameplates in a low corner of its front window, but it steadfastly remains a low-key operation. The owners ignore most media inquiries, with restaurant staffers acting as virtual bouncers on their behalf. The nearly hidden marquee befuddles visitors who don’t have global positioning systems. And most telling? There is no one with the title of head chef.
    “We are all just Burma SuperStar staff. It’s a cultural thing,” says Desmond Htunlin, who owns the restaurant with his wife, Joycelyn Lee. Htunlin, who prefers to abandon that Burmese name and is widely known simply as Desmond, explained that he and his wife originally came to Alameda to help out a friend who owned the struggling Hinn Tha Burma Bistro, the restaurant’s previous incarnation. One thing led to another and the pair took over the whole operation, including the wise move of installing a new head chef who is not a head chef. The chef goes nameless because, said Htunlin, “In the U.S., a chef is always looking for attention. That’s not what it is at Burma SuperStar.” It doesn’t need to be that way at Burma SuperStar. The restaurant, the third in a brood owned by Htunlin and Lee, is nearly an exact replica, in menu, of the original Burma SuperStar on San Francisco’s Clement Street. A fixture of the Inner Richmond district since 1992 and purchased by Htunlin and Lee in 2001, that SuperStar is as famous for its Burmese-style shrimp curry and traditional tea leaf salad as for its no-reservation policy and excruciating two-hour wait for tables at peak hours. In fact, it is that very yin and yang of a reputation, says one staffer at the Alameda location, that made Htunlin and Lee balk at any attempt to curry favor in terms of public relations. Quite simply, they feared creating the kind of monster they already have on their hands in San Francisco. So any and all awareness of this Island’s Burma SuperStar has been generated by simple word of mouth.
    The marketing strategy, or lack of one, doesn’t seem to have hurt the comfortably contemporary 46-seat restaurant. Though the wait for a table is substantially shorter in Alameda than San Francisco—a summer Friday night visit to the Clement Street location had a prohibitive 42 parties waiting for a table at 7 p.m., while just five parties were waiting at the Alameda location at the same time on a Saturday—the quality of the food is on par with the original. No surprise there, as Htunlin says some of the staff rotates in and out of the San Francisco location, and training of the current staff began there as well.
    For those unfamiliar with the cuisine of Burma (renamed Myanmar by the military government in 1989, giving rise to the thought of how catchy a name “Myanmar SuperStar” might have been), a most basic of primers is this: While distinctively its own, the cookery does draw influences from bordering countries India, China, Thailand, Bangladesh and Laos. So while diners can go an authentic Burmese direction, as with the tea leaf salad, a dish that raises the ante on any other salad, anywhere, with its ginger, fried garlic, peanuts, sunflower seeds, tomato, dried shrimp, and, oh yes, leaves of romaine and Burmese tea, it is also possible to please less adventurous palates with straight-forward, but excellently executed, wok-fried sesame beef or walnut shrimp in the Chinese tradition.
    It’s the venturesome diner, though, that may have difficulty ordering. Because choosing just what to sample of the 89-plus menu items (not including the $25 Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi T-shirts, which are also listed) might be the most arduous task of all. The Rainbow Salad ($10.75), though somewhat chalky on the tongue, is wildly popular and famed for the tableside preparation of its 22 ingredients, which arrive arranged on a plate, as if on an artist’s palette, before tossing. Then there’s that tea leaf salad ($9), and the samusas—triangular Burmese raviolis filled with curry and potatoes—beckoning as both straightforward appetizer ($8) and a customer-favorite soup ($10.75). All these practically mandatory dishes threaten to fill the stomach before a diner reaches the second page of a five-page menu that divides dishes into chicken, pork, beef, lamb and seafood, each of which hovers in the $14 price range. Missteps are few. Lettuce cups with cured pork and water chestnut stuffing ($8.75) were murky at best, and burned garlic threatened to ruin that mixture as well as a plate of garlic noodles with duck ($9). Service, too, can be unseasoned, with a young waitress correcting a guest’s proper pronunciation of Tsingtao beer with her own incorrect version. But such is the exception rather than the rule. More typical is the best-of-menu Burmese chicken-on-the-bone and shrimp casserole baked in a clay pot with cardamom and cinnamon ($14.75). Close your eyes, take a forkful. You’ll want to compliment the head chef. Whoever that is.

The Details

BURMA SUPERSTAR. Burmese. 1345 Park St., (510) 522-6200, www.burmasuperstar.com. Serves lunch 11 a.m.–3:30 p.m. Tue.–Sun., dinner 5 p.m.–9:30 p.m. Tue.–Thu., Sun., 5 p.m.–10 p.m. Fri.-Sat.Credit cards accepted, full bar, wheelchair accessable, reservations, $$

—By Candace Murphy
—Photography by Lori Eanes